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Sunday, September 14, 2008

Tomb Doomed More Than $10 Million In Property

The Pyramid is more empty than we even thought it was.

Memphis City Councilman Bill Boyd recently toured the arena and learned that many of its “furniture, fixtures, and equipment” are missing. According to one person who has walked through the vacant building, “It looks like locusts went through it.”

Gone are thousands of chairs, dozens of televisions and mini-refrigerators, concession stands' equipment, and expensive kitchen equipment. Mr. Boyd was quoted as saying that as much as $1 million in public property is missing, and there’s no record of who moved it and where.

We’ve been told that some of it has been moved to the Memphis Convention Center and the Shelby County Correction Center, but that the accounting is incomplete. There are even unsubstantiated reports that some of it ended up with local nonprofit organizations, however, there are strict legal procedures, particularly at county government, for doing this, and there’s no record of this happening.

SMG, manager of the Memphis Cook Convention Center and The Pyramid, is preparing a report for Councilman Boyd, and they say they have a list of items that were removed, but it’s pretty hard for a management company – that depends on its relationship with city and county officials – to ride herd on its bosses if they want to remove equipment.

Actually, although it was reported that the missing items were worth as much as $1 million, the estimate is at least missing a zero. A conservative estimate of the cost of the items is more than $10 million, and the expansive, hotel-quality kitchen made up much of that amount.

Mayoral power stealing real estate to make money for itself is a classic conflict of interest. Becoming a real estate developer while in office is more than a no-no, it is corruption! If you don't have a law covering this you are unprotected from corruption.